(They are also already warning about the flu, I don't know whether it's because last year's was bad - though I think that was partly because one of the strains that became common wasn't in the vaccine - or if they know from previous observation (e.g., in Asia, where the season starts before ours) that it's going to be bad. My doctor did mention at the last checkup that her office was going to be doing flu jabs and so now I have to decide: do I go there, a known quantity with good nurses good at giving shots and pay the co-pay, or do a I got a big-box pharmacy and wait around for a long time and get someone who might have less experience, but not pay that $25?)
* But yeah, I'm tired. I added a round and part of a second one to Celestarium last night but that was largely forcing myself to stay up a little later than I otherwise might have, just so I could say "at least I did some knitting today."
* This is just a busy week and oh how happy I will be when this week is over. The exam I have to give early next week is already written and sent to the printers', I do have one exam to write for the following week but maybe I can do that during office hours next week. I really feel it these days when I have to be out in the evening a lot. I mean, I was never a social butterfly but now it's more like "uuuuuuuugggggghhhh, I have to put my shoes back on and go back out"
* I do have Saturday fieldwork scheduled but at least at this point it looks like I have no Friday afternoon obligations so I guess I use some of that time for a wal-mart run (ugh, wal-mart on a Friday afternoon, but I have little choice otherwise) to get milk and other fresh things I need. And I guess I also have to remember to file the grade-and-attendance reports Friday morning, they are due. So I have to try to get the exam I give tomorrow graded tomorrow evening after piano, because tomorrow afternoon is a student symposium I should go to, and Friday morning there won't be time, and...
some days, me trying to find a way to get everything done in the time frame where I really need to have it done feels like this:
* I did help feed the college kids at church last night - my part of the deal was getting dessert (I went with those little ice cream cups on the grounds that that's easy, and also if they don't get all eaten up they can just sit in their fridge for another week, and ice cream is better than something baked after taco salad anyway) and also cooking the meat and heating the beans - the person I worked with cut up the veggies and got chips and cheese and salsa and stuff. But, because I'm younger and have fewer knee issues, I was the one to carry the stuff up to the room (both the adult leader and the kids were late getting there, so since we had the stuff done, we decided to put it up there). I made perhaps 10 trips (let's see: chips, lettuce and tomatoes, ice cream, cheese, toppings, beans, beef, and then getting the ice chest to fill with ice....so maybe not quite ten) up and down a double flight of stairs in the un airconditioned part of the church.
And then, after I got home, I was walking from my garage up to my house and I thought "holy cow, what's wrong with me? All of a sudden my legs are weak and shaky...." and then immediately thought - well, yeah, duh. Because on top of all those up and down trips I had been on my feet the usual amount (about 3 hours) for a teaching Tuesday, and maybe another hour and a half involved with cooking the stuff.
I'm not sore today, which is good, but I do guess I'm not as young as I once was. (Though I will say it was pretty humid yesterday, especially in a part of the building where the AC was off, and I think that takes a lot out of a person.)
* The new Folio Society flyer came with the new fall books. There are a couple I want, though I admit at the moment I feel like my coffers are emptier than I would like (did not earn money over the summer, plus, I already paid the very large home-insurance bill for the year; it always comes due in September). Not sure whether to just order what I want on the grounds that life is short and you should take happiness where you can, and if need be, transfer a couple hundred from savings to cover the cost, or if to hold off longer to see if the increase I was counting on from some of the changes my uni made to how it does things actually shows up in my paycheck (it seems not to have for August).
* And yeah, the thought of grabbing happiness where you can has been top of mind these recent days and weeks.
For one thing: the big anniversary of yesterday. I hadn't thought much about it - being on a college campus where most of the current students were toddlers or babies when it happened, you don't have the same remembering that you might in a group of entirely-mature-adults. (Also, few of us here were directly affected, in the sense of seeing it happen in person or losing someone close to us).
Driving around town - I had to go get the ice cream and the ground beef - Sirius XM was playing John Adams' "On the Transmigration of Souls" and I guess I was unaware before now of the piece and its origins. At first I thought "okay, it's one of those modern pieces designed to invoke numinousness with discordant sounds and....are they very softly playing a tape of voices speaking in the background?" (I did not hear the very initial part, with the sirens, or I might have figured it out faster). It was only when it got to the part about midway where a child was reading a "please, have you seen him" note that I realized what the piece was. And it kind of caught me.
Later, I listened to the whole thing at home on YouTube. I am generally not a fan of "modern" stuff with lots of discord and even sometimes outright atonality, but for this piece...it works. Adams has done a masterful job, because the piece is neither mawkish nor jingoistic; it seems to address the sadnesses, individual and corporate, that people experienced in regards that. I read an interview with him done shortly after the piece was written, and he commented that he had wanted " to achieve in musical terms the same sort of feeling one gets upon entering one of those old, majestic cathedrals in France or Italy. When you walk into the Chartres Cathedral, for example, you experience an immediate sense of something otherworldly. You feel you are in the presence of many souls, generations upon generations of them, and you sense their collected energy as if they were all congregated or clustered in that one spot."
I think he did it. I did feel like, before I even knew what the piece was, the sort of "cathedral like" feeling of it, even though the music is VERY different from what I think of as typical "cathedral music."
It was written in 2002, and I can only imagine the emotional impact of it must have been incredibly visceral - it was premiered in New York, and it would have been just around the one-year anniversary. I have still some pretty vivid memories of the event even though I was 1000 miles away and only saw it in rebroadcasts....but still, it does seem like it happened less than 17 years ago now.
And the title caught me - as he points out, "transmigration" can mean a variety of things, though I admit given my background, I picture it as the soul crossing from life into whatever comes after it. And I admit, that's something that's been more top of mind to me recently. Oh, no, I'm not turning Goth at this late stage, but I find now that I'm on the cusp of 50, I think about such things more. Also in the wake of Steve's unexpected death this past spring. And having lost other people around me. And more recently, earlier this fall, worrying about my dad, that terrible Thursday-into-Friday where all I knew was that he was in the hospital, intubated, and things to me looked very bad.
And I recognize, I have to get more comfortable at sitting with this thought - that the people I love best in this world will, simply by virtue of their being much older than I am - wind up leaving me some day, and I will have to carry on. Oh, depending on the relationship I may take some days off work to travel for a funeral, and as I said, I may look up a grief counselor, but I also recognize it's kind of the natural progression of things and I'll have to figure out a path forward; I have before.
The other thing I think about, late some nights when I'm not sleeping: someday, it will be YOUR soul transmigrating. And I admit, that's where my brain clamps down and goes NO NOT POSSIBLE and my inner six year old sticks her figurative fingers in her figurative ears and goes "LA LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU." I suppose eventually I will have to accept that idea as more than an abstract sort of thing but I guess I'm not ready to yet. (I'm hoping it's not for a v. long time. Shortly after Steve's death, I made the comment aloud to the empty air, "You left us too soon. In 50 or 60 years when I get to Heaven, expect me to seek you out to kick your butt" though of course, I don't know what form an Afterlife takes and if that's even possible. Which is also why I kind of clamp down when I think about it - the whole Great Unknown quality of it.)
* And also thinking back, years and years (though not quite as far back as 2001): I was thinking the other day how I miss the "heyday" of blogs - when there were dozens of knitting blogs, and lots of other "stuff I think" blogs. It was a heady time. It was like publishing your own virtual 'zine. You could read whatever interested you.
Most of those blogs are gone now. In some cases, the person's life getting busy killed the blog off - or they took a job where talking about their own day-to-day life was maybe a risky thing, for the future of their job. Or they had a kid and the kid took up all their time. Or they got bored with it. Or, some people moved to Facebook (which I still don't do, and given stuff I've read recently about it, I'm glad). Or they went to Twitter, which is fine for what it is but it has no "memory" in the fact that its archival quality is pretty terrible and it's hard to search, or Tumblr, which seems to (a) be very heavily visual and (b) often has people posting stuff with ZERO attribution (like people do on Pinterest) and also (c) often it tends to be a wretched hive of "well I am more woke than you" or "that artist you like? Oh, haven't you heard...." (about how said artist is Bad in some way)
But anyway: I miss the old days of blogs, especially knitting blogs, where there was a lot of "Here is this thing I made! I enjoyed making it, here are some of the things I did when I was making it" (e.g., pattern modifications and such) or there were reflections on what knitting meant to them.
And comments. Oh, there used to be more commenting back and forth. I have a few regular commenters on here and I treasure them, but I don't get the volume of comments I once did and that makes me a little sad. And I don't know if it's that my writing doesn't lend itself to people commenting, or if the way people read stuff now (like: on their phones) makes commenting more of a pain and so people are less likely to do it, or fewer people read, or what. (I don't look at my stats all that often; currently I seem to get between 30-50 readers a day, which I guess is small).
But yeah. While there are things about now that are better than then, there are also things about then that are better than now. I guess you really can't maximize everything...
1 comment:
I don't do humid very well
Post a Comment